Not content to simply add new concealed carry restrictions, Attorney General Kathleen Kane has decided to promote bans on commonly owned firearms and accessories used by Pennsylvania residents in a national television appearance. She took to Chris Matthews’ show to say that Pennsylvanians would gladly accept new gun restrictions.

I love the Matthews catches himself not using the proper newspeak and changes gun control to gun safety.

And “I think a lot of people feel the same way…” would at least imply that she thinks there people who do think people have a right to murder children. Has she spoken to any of these people? Could she identify them? Has she recommended psychological help to them?

Lets call Matthews what he is, State Run media. And he needs to close his mouth, our national mainstream media is doing nothing that the Government is not signing off on these days so we the people will start calling them as they are appropriately acting as State Run Media Outlets.

Mrs. Attorney General, No one ever said a law abiding person in the United States of America thinks we own weapons of any sort to Take Down anyone in a classroom. If I am using weapons to take down anyone, Mrs. Prosecutor it is a criminal committing a crime!

That’s the last time I vote for anyone based on a single issue! Please don’t flame me, but I voted for Kane hoping she would get to the bottom of the PSU / NCAA debacle and the school would come out the better for it. She’s obviously now has another agenda: rights restrictions and maintaining some crony’s union jobs in both the state lottery and state store systems. Yes, I was an idiot!

I voted against Kane, and not being a PSU grad or fan, that issue didn’t motivate me at all. But I can offer understanding for what you did, because in virtually all of our races the offerings on both sides are usually so scummy, that if some issue causes you not to be able to hold your nose tightly enough to be able to vote for the “preferred” candidate, it is entirely understandable to me.

I know it’s hyperbole, and violates Godwin’s Law, but I always think of that phrase that allegedly was popular in Germany in the early years of the 1930s: “We’ll let the Nazis handle the communists, then we’ll be able to handle the Nazi’s.” How’d that work for them?

Folks, he asked people not to flame him for making an error in judgement over how to determine a vote. People vote on many different issues. Also, look at the vote totals across the state and you’ll see that many people who otherwise support gun rights didn’t realize how anti-gun she was before the election. Yes, we did try to tell people. But apparently the message didn’t get out there. Let’s focus on getting our message out to more people rather than trying to run off people who admit they want to ally with us.

I believe in our area, Bloomberg (?) sponsored TV ads for Kane, that pitched nothing but how anti-gun she was, and would be. So, thanks to their side, we were very well informed locally — it seemed the ads ran every few minutes in our market. Other than that, her campaigning seemed negligible.

Point being, anyone not in our targeted suburban region very well could have missed the message about her anti-gun positions.

Even then, depending on how someone takes their media, they might not have seen the ads. We cut the cord and reception with the antenna we bought sucks, so we don’t watch any broadcast television at all. We have Netflix and the internet. (I admit, I hate missing PCN. I may finally subscribe to their online services, but they don’t have archives access yet.) If we weren’t really into the issue, we might not have caught it.

But your point about the directed media market is still an important one for the many more who do watch tv. Bloomberg knew not to run those ads in the other tv markets that hit Pennsylvania.

At the risk of putting words in somebody else’s mouth, when he said PSU/NCAA debacle I assumed he meant the fact that A) it’s likely a lot of people who have yet to be exposed helped cover up the fact that a PSU employee was raping children, or B) it’s absurd that the NCAA fines are being shouldered by all PA taxpayers rather than coming directly out of the PSU football budget. The possibility that the vote was related to an ag school football team being bowl eligible never crossed my mind.

On balance it still seems like a questionable reason to pick a candidate, but he’s already conceded that he made a poor choice.

I haven’t kept up with it, but the last I knew Pennsylvanians had only extremely limited access to things like initiative and referendum, and those only for issues where the legislators expect the people always to get the right (statist) answer, and hope they will. I’m pretty sure recall is nearly or totally non-existent.

When I was more involved with those issues, more than one PA legislator told me candidly that they held all the cards, liked it that way, and forget them ever ceding any political power to the people that they didn’t have to.

I frequently use as an example of the lack of importance of public opinion — except for sexy hot-button issues — that at one time very formal PSU polling showed that the lowest level of support for giving citizens the right to have a direct vote on issues, for any demographic, was 85 percent. But that was almost twenty years ago, and you can see how far that issue progressed.

At that time a small group of us persuaded the Bucks County Commissioners to put bond issues on the ballot for binding citizen approval, which they could do by law, but could not be forced to do. They were magnanimous enough to credit us in public. But they only did it for popular bond issues they knew would pass, and for the county, those bond issues had the advantage of not counting against the statutory borrowing limit.

Bottom line is, don’t expect the oligarchy to ever cede any real power to citizens.

Andy N’s #2 is correct: PA taxpayers should not have to shoulder a $60M burden, the NCAA has no jurisdiction or due process to met out such a fine, and, being a PSU grad, it really p*$$ed me off that the name of a good school was brought down by the actions of a few. When 25% of the population believed Joe actually molested kids because of biased news media coverage I knew something was wrong.

I could care less about the bowl games & football in general. I haven’t watched TV in ages (running a farm is my full time second job) and it sounds like Bloombergs anti-gun adds would never have made it out to the Central PA broadcast area anyway.

Finally, even as a conservative/libertarian I believed our state needed a hedge against Corbett. That guy is a special interest snake in the grass; he’s almost as bad as ‘Fast Eddie’ Rendell was. I just didn’t see the gun issue ever becoming a problem in PA.